MBS RECAP: Bonds Buck Good Friday Trend With Help From MOAB

Heading into Good Friday weekend, it's not uncommon for bond markets to retrace whatever the trend happens to be earlier in the week. In other words, if bonds were rallying (as they were this week), they tend to stop rallying. Combined with the characteristic drop in volume, this phenomenon isn't any more complicated than a simple "paring of positions heading into an extended weekend. That same old pattern looked to be repeating through today's morning hours, but things changed abruptly just after the noon hour. Stocks began losing ground fairly quickly and headlines came out regarding a big bomb dropped by the US in Afghanistan (The "mother of all bombs" or MOAB , as it were–the biggest non-nuclear bomb available). It's not abundantly clear which way the causality…(read more)